Tuesday, May 13, 2008
It's no news to say that most of the big summer movies of recent years have been made without any real trace of craft or spirit. The people behind these movies act as if their job was solely to get you to hand over your ticket money -- actually sitting through the movie appears to be an afterthought, and most movies look as if it is. But even though most of us know it, we're still susceptible to the perniciousness of the hype machine, the nagging feeling that we'll be out of it if we don't go see "Van Helsing" or "The Day After Tomorrow" (which, I admit, I have no intention of seeing; 9/11 ended my appetite for watching mass destruction for kicks).
We expect studios to go all-out hawking their wares. But that hype has bled boundaries of TV commercials and billboards and posters. The recent plan (vociferously shot down by baseball fans) to put the Spider-Man logo on bases is just the most obvious example. The absence of the Spidey logo on a few pieces of white rubber isn't going to matter much when Tobey Maguire is being profiled in every magazine and making the rounds of the talk shows. What has become especially insidious about the full-on hype is that it has even taken over the one place that is supposed to stand as an alternative to advertising: The press. The press has always been somewhat willing to kiss the asses of the studio publicists for access to the stars. But the people who call the shots in the arts coverage in the media are, more than ever, acting like those people who are afraid they'll seem out of it if they don't see "Troy."
The formula began with the 1975 release of "Jaws" -- mass openings which allowed movies to recoup much of their cost in the first few weeks -- and has accelerated to such insane rapidity that even the public is in on it, and most highly touted movies are old news by their second weekend in release. If you wanted to find out how much a movie had made over the weekend, you had to look in "Variety," and no one outside the industry was doing that. Now the weekend grosses are reported on Sunday evening newscasts and in Monday morning papers. It isn't just agents and publicists who can say how much a movie dropped over the weekend, it's the casual moviegoer. And by Monday, even the new movies with the biggest weekend openings have begun to be shunted aside for coverage of the upcoming weekend's blockbuster. In the space of three weekends, "Troy" can go from being celebrated for opening big to being declared a bit of a disappointment -- though what movie wouldn't be considered a disappointment when the yardstick of success is the $100 million-plus opening of "Shrek 2"?
For a highly promoted studio movie to open in the No. 1 box-office position is about as difficult as packing a barroom with a "Free Beer" sign. It is rare when a movie holds the No. 1 position for several weeks, as "The Passion of the Christ" recently did. But that movie benefited from the shrewdest (and in some ways, most cynical) ad campaign I've ever seen -- one designed to bring out the faithful and keep them coming out. Most movies, even very successful ones, begin to lose screens and show times by even the third weekend of their release, because of the sense that they no longer have the urgency they did when, say, the star was on the cover of Newsweek. It's a sense that's promulgated not just by the media's obsession with news cycles, but by the idea that all stories last a finite -- and increasingly short -- life span, that the public "tires" quickly. (On the May 16 edition of CNN's media-review show "Reliable Sources," for example, Time's Mark Thompson compared the Google hits on the Abu Ghraib story for the previous weekend [3,000 at any given time] to the hits as they stood a week later [600-800 at any given time] and concluded that this was a story "in decline.")
Get Salon in your mailbox!